Center for Culture, Organizations and Politics - Previously Affiliated

Introductory Note:

My dissertation examines the origins, development and regulation of the financial institutions that arose to serve “ordinary” people in modern America. Why and how did mid-twentieth century Americans gain access to and come to rely on a system of financial institutions for saving and borrowing over their life courses when a little over one hundred years earlier formal financial services had been primarily reserved for the commercial needs of elite merchants and tradesmen? The question of how the expansion of access to financial institutions took place has some relevance for current social scientific and public policy debates on working and poor people’s access to financial institutions. Yet this history has received relatively little scholarly attention. The few studies that have examined the question focus narrowly on the costs and risks of financial intermediation and contracting between savers and borrowers as the key to the puzzle. My dissertation seeks to broaden our discussion of the development of financial institutions for working and poor people by rooting it within historical changes in social policies, protective regulation, and the organization of the household economy. In particular, it explores three analytical themes. First, most financial institutions for working and poor people were established by social philanthropists and leaders in the nonprofit sector and reflected changing ideas about dependence and social welfare. The innovations that savings institutions introduced reflected the organizational assumptions and concerns of their founders and were little influenced by for-profit commercial banking. Second, the nineteenth-century state (both legislatures and courts) played an active and interventionist role in determining the structure and development of the institutions through an extensive web of protective legislation and rulings that promoted and stabilized financial institutions serving working households. Finally, samples of personal financial records illustrate that working people adopted and used the institutions in socially stratified ways that reflected long-term changes in the organization and economic strategies of the household. This first chapter deals primarily with the first of these three issues: the changing social policy context within which financial institutions for working and poor people arose.